


Paint me like one of your French girls

by stillscape



Category: Parks and Recreation
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-20
Updated: 2015-01-20
Packaged: 2018-03-08 08:53:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3203279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillscape/pseuds/stillscape
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A 1920s Parisian artist AU, because...well, because. Because there wasn't one?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paint me like one of your French girls

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ashisfriendly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashisfriendly/gifts).



“You asked me what I thought of  _The Ice Town_.”   
  
“Yes.” Ben’s head disappeared back behind his easel. “This isn’t a proportionate response.”   
  
“Yes, it is. I told you, I don’t think it’s a total disaster.”   
  
“That painting is unsalvageable.”  
  
Leslie shook her head. The lightness of her newly bobbed hair against her neck, the freedom of it, still surprised her.  _Well_ , she thought, glancing down,  _I have been surprising myself a lot lately_.   
  
“You’ve been stuck thinking about it for too long. You need to work on something else for a while without thinking about _that_ , and then go back and finish it.”   
  
“I do work on other things.”  
  
“Not just those still lifes. You’re a better artist than that.”   
  
His head was still behind the easel, keeping him from her eyes--and her from his, which was probably more his point.  
  
“Going back to figure studies always helps me,” she said.  
  
“Yes, but…”   
  
“Ben.” She tried to sound firm about it. They were colleagues, and friends. Both colleagues and friends helped each other out. That was what they had been doing lately: strolling Paris, sketching, talking about art over coffee and wine. Besides, it was the 1920s--modern times--and she was a modern woman. “I have been painted nude before, you know.”   
  
Now his head emerged from behind the easel, hair wild, brow furrowed. He swiped a shirtsleeve across his forehead, and Leslie was pleased to see a charcoal pencil poised between his fingertips.   
  
“You told me you didn’t pose for the  _Diaphena._ ”   
  
“Well, no. I didn’t. But it is me, and I am nude in it.”   
  
Ben said nothing. But, at long last, he let himself look at her. She tried to picture herself as Ben ought to be picturing her. She was a body in sunlight, no more and no less, delicious sunlight that warmed her skin as it bathed her in what she couldn’t help hoping was a particularly attractive glow.   
  
“See? Just me.”   
  
A slight, crooked smile crossed Ben’s face. “It’s strange to see you…”   
  
She swallowed. “Nude?”   
  
“No. Sitting so still when you’re not doing anything.”   
  
His head ducked behind the easel again, but this time, she heard the familiar, comforting scratch of pencil against paper. It wasn’t until he paused, looked at her, looked back at his sketchpad, looked at her again, and scowled that she started to feel nervous.   
  
 _Crap on a pain du chocolat_ , she thought. That part had never really occurred to her, how long she’d have to remain draped motionless across this chaise.   
  


* * *

  
  


* * *

  
  
“Ben Wyatt!”   
  
Ben nodded. “Chris.”   
  
“I haven’t seen you at one of Madame Meagle’s salons in quite some time. We have so much catching up to do. How’s your work going?”   
  
“It’s fine.”   
  
He tried to sound vague about it. His work wasn’t fine. He’d been painting variations on the same still life for months now, arranging and rearranging his objects--antique sword, comptometer, and that decorative paper cone he’d found at a street market--atop his unfashionable plaid tablecloth, as though that was going to make a difference. Always, his incomplete intended masterwork loomed large behind him. This was not a metaphor; the painting was enormous, and he had nowhere to put it but the back wall of his top-floor studio. “It is literally looming over you,” Chris had said, when he’d visited.   
  
“That’s great, buddy!” Chris gave him a clap on the back. “I have these to show you. Tell me what you think. They’re just preliminary sketches, but I think I’ve made a real breakthrough.”   
  
Ben accepted the sketchbook, and flipped through it to find a series of outdoor scenes: a woman ice skating (though it was summer), a woman strolling through the Jardin du Luxembourg, a woman playing tennis, a woman horseback riding. When he got to the woman swimming on the beach, he finally realized Chris had been drawing the same woman over and over again. The pictures were good, there was no doubt about that. They were literal, but they had a certain vigor. That was a word often used to discuss Chris’s work. Vigor. Ben’s was often called precise; it was never meant as a compliment, although he felt it should be.   
  
He snapped the cover shut and handed it back. “So, you found a new muse?”   
  
Chris nodded. “Her name is Ann Perkins. She is an American expatriate, just like us, and she is absolutely lovely. She should be attending today, in fact. I would love for you to meet her.”   
  
“Great.” He nodded again, and swept a glance over the salon. It was getting as full as Madame Meagle ever let it get, but he didn’t see too many people he knew, and that was a pity. Where was Jean-Ralphio? There was nothing to make you relieved to be stuck in your own headspace like a conversation with a Surrealist.   
  
“And there she is! Ann Perkins. Come meet Benjamin Wyatt. Ben, I’ve told her all about you.”   
  
Ann Perkins was exactly as he had expected, based on the sketches and a long knowledge of Chris’s type: anyone would call her pretty, and she had an air of wholesomeness but not a whiff of girl-next-door. He had no doubts that she was lovely in many ways. Chris’s paramours inevitably were.   
  
“Hello,” said Ann, shaking Ben’s hand. “This is my friend, Leslie Knope. We’re traveling together. She’s also an artist.”   
  
Leslie Knope extended a hand too, but in a weird old-fashioned way, wrist high, fingers pointed down, like she expected him to genuflect. She wore a fashionable cloche, cherry red, over blonde bobbed hair that was just a little bit wavy; she kept touching the ends of it with the fingertips of her left hand. Ben thought the bob might be recent. She wore black silk trousers, expertly tailored. The nails of her right hand were filed and shaped; there was a tiny smear of purple paint at the tip of the index finger.  
  
“Ann is not an artist,” announced Chris, as though this mattered. “She is a nurse. Isn’t that fascinating?”   
  
Ann Perkins’ profession was not fascinating. It was a fact.   
  
Leslie Knope was fascinating, and his fingers itched to draw her.   
  


* * *

  
  
“I’ve been studying with Ron Swanson, and he’s great. In his own way. I mean…” Leslie swirled the remains of her café au lait, contemplating. She’d wanted to put a fifth sugar in, but the garçon had begun shooting her dirty looks. “He’s avant-garde? But in a very traditional way. He won’t admit to being avant-garde. He’s very…”  
  
“Idiosyncratic?”   
  
“Yes!” She smiled at Ben. “That’s precisely the word. Idiosyncratic.”   
  
“Does he really build his own readymades?”   
  
Leslie nodded. “He does. They’re beautiful, but he insists they’re not art. If you go to his studio? He actually built all the furniture himself. And he uses it. All of it. He builds these chairs, and he  _sits_  on them. He lets other people sit on them.”   
  
“Well…” Benjamin Wyatt, or no, Ben--he was Ben to her now--exhaled. “That is the actual purpose of a chair.”   
  
“Once I was trying to get him to give me advice about landscape painting and he told me it was pointless for people to paint pictures of nature when they could just go outside and stand in it.”   
  
Ben laughed, just as she’d intended, but then his expression turned annoyed. “But what about representation?”   
  
She shrugged. Ben lit a cigarette and immediately stubbed it out without smoking it.   
  
“That’s going to bother me now,” he said.   
  
They left the cafe and walked together to the Pont de Passy, where they set up easels.  
  
“You really like this bridge better than the Pont Neuf?”   
  
Ben nodded. “I do. I don’t know why, but I do.”   
  
“Chagall painted it.”  
  
“I know that.” He sounded annoyed.   
  
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound like I thought you didn’t know.”   
  
“What? No.” He shook his head. “It’s…never mind.”   
  
“No, tell me.”   
  
“Just...something personal. A personal feeling.”   
  
“So tell me,” she insisted. “Art is personal, isn’t it? Or it should be.”   
  


* * *

  
  
He told her. Not right then, or even that day; he told her the next week, at a small round table in a dimly lit café near the Louvre. They’d been in the Louvre for days now, for hours each day. Leslie was determined to see all of it and sketch most of it, or at least the masterworks; her red leather portfolio, now overstuffed, testified to her productivity. Ben had produced very few pencil studies of sculptures and many pencil studies of Leslie Knope, none of which she knew about. He rather hoped she never found out about them: how intensely he’d focused on her small hands as they flew across her sketchpad, how he’d rendered, from every conceivable angle, her nose as it scrunched in concentration, how he’d perfected the back of her neck as it sloped into her shoulder.  _Perfected_  wasn’t a word he liked using in relation to his own work, but he had no better way to describe a series of studies he’d done that afternoon as she busied herself over  _Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss_.   
  
“So here’s a question.” Leslie looked at him, and not the mostly-uneaten plate of escargot they’d dared each other to order. “What are you doing? I mean, what are you working on?”   
  
He shrugged. “Oh, you know. Stuff. Why?”   
  
“Because you never paint.”   
  
“I paint,” he said, bristling.   
  
“No.” Leslie shook her head. She wasn’t wearing the cloche today, and the ends of her bob swayed gently. The front part of her hair, she’d clipped back with a sort of abstract jeweled butterfly pin, and he couldn’t stop looking at the pin now, which sparkled in the candlelight and called attention to just the right point of her face. “You spend all your daylight hours showing me Paris. I doubt you’ve set foot in your studio since we met.”   
  
“That’s not true.” It wasn’t. He had to set foot in his studio; he lived there.   
  
“So what are you working on?”   
  
“I don’t know.”   
  
Leslie looked confused, but said nothing. Wine. There was wine on the table. Leslie refilled his glass without asking, and he took a sip, letting the acid sit on his tongue for an extra-long moment before he swallowed.   
  
“I’ve been...stuck. For a while. Since the--the exhibition.”   
  
“The one where you were supposed to show  _The Ice Town_?”   
  
“ _Oui, madame_.”   
  
“ _Madamoiselle_ ,” Leslie corrected.   
  
“Anyway, I haven’t been working on anything major since then. I’ve been doing a series of still lives, but they’re not really worth mentioning.”  
  
Leslie’s nose scrunched. “So what is worth mentioning?”  
  
“Nothing, really.”   
  
“Nothing?”  
  
Ben shook his head into his glass. “I guess I’ve just been wandering around everywhere, looking for something to paint.”   
  
“And how is  _The Ice Town_?”   
  
He had taken another sip of wine, and now he had to fight not to spit it out. “How is it?”   
  
She nodded. “How is it?”   
  
“It’s how it always is. How it always has been.” His glass wasn’t empty, but he refilled it anyway. “It’s unfinished.”   
  
“Oh.” Leslie tore a small piece of bread from the loaf that sat next to the escargot, popped it into her mouth, and chewed thoughtfully. Ben did the same, although he was much less hungry than he had been a few moments ago. “When are you going to let me see it?”   
  


* * *

  
  
The two best friends stood together in Madame Meagle’s salon, jaws dropped.   
  
“Oh, my god,” said Ann.   
  
Leslie didn’t know what to say. Eventually what came out was, “I’ve never posed nude for him. Or anyone.”   
  
“No, I didn’t think you had.” Ann was on the verge of laughter, Leslie knew. “Leslie, this is amazing. This whole thing is amazing. Look, look at that--” she pointed to a smaller figure in the painting-- “That’s Monsieur Haverford, isn’t it? That annoying couturier we met? He’s the fat brown baby.”   
  
Ann continued to express her delight over the painting, but Leslie stopped listening. She’d seen Gergich’s work plenty of times. Some people said he was talented; she’d always thought that those people were idiots, that Gergich was a hack. Meeting him here in Paris had done nothing to change her conceptions. But now, in front of his new work  _Diaphenia_ , she felt something. She  _felt_.   
  
From the corner of her eye, she saw two men enter the salon. One, the taller one, began making the rounds, shaking hands and clapping shoulders. He appeared not to have noticed the painting.   
  
But Leslie didn’t care about Chris’s reaction. She kept her eyes trained on Ben, who had  _his_  eyes trained on the painting as he crossed the salon. Slowly, he removed his straw boater hat. He used his free hand to rearrange his hair, flattening down the front of it. He swallowed, twice.   
  
By the time he’d gotten all the way to her and Ann, his knit tie was half unknotted. He looked, as her nana would say, in a right state.   
  
“Hello, Ben,” said Ann. “What do you think of the painting?”   
  
Ben jumped, as if startled. “Oh. Hi, Ann.”   
  
“The painting.” Ann elbowed him in the ribs.   
  
“It’s…” Ben looked at Leslie, then at the painting, then at Leslie again. “Interesting subject matter, I guess. Kind of a literal interpretation of it, though.”  
  
“Well,” said Leslie, “Gergich has never been any good at abstraction.”   
  
“No,” Ben agreed. “The composition’s not bad. I guess. It’s...”   
  
“Leslie.” She swiveled her head to see a wicked, delighted grin on her best friend’s face. “Tell Ben what you were just telling me, about how you posed for this.”   
  
“What? I didn’t! I told you I  _didn’t_  pose for this. I had no idea Gergich was painting me.”   
  
Ann snickered.   
  
Ben walked away, saying nothing.   
  
Several minutes later, as Leslie sat in front of the painting, still trying to make sense of the evening, Madame Meagle sidled up to her, raised her eyebrows, and extended her hand. A small folded note was between her index and middle fingers.   
  
“Get it,” she told Leslie.   
  
Leslie took the paper and unfolded it. Just a few lines were scribbled, in charcoal pencil that had already smudged.   
  
“Ann? Ann, where are you?”   
  
“I’m right here. What’s that note?”   
  
“It’s from Ben.” She took a deep breath.   
  
“And?”   
  
“He’s inviting me to his studio.”   
  


* * *

  
  
He had no idea what he had been thinking. None. None, except a vague sense--probably misguided--that if he (and half of Paris’s art community) had seen a painting of Leslie Knope in the nude, then it would only be fair for him to let Leslie Knope see his work.   
  
The light in his studio was especially beautiful this morning. His studio always had good light; that was why he had chosen it. But today his workspace was bathed in an especially rosy glow.   
  
Leslie Knope was coming to his studio. Women had been to his studio before. Of course they had. Madame Meagle had been there, and a few casual girlfriends, and his sister, but none of their opinions mattered now (not even Madame Meagle’s, and her opinion really  _did_  matter, in the career sense).   
  
He rearranged his still life objects, hoping they would look particularly arty. Whatever that meant. He rearranged them again, and again, and was rearranging them once more when he heard a light tap on the door.   
  
She let herself in, and there she was, standing inside his studio in her cheerful drop-waist dress and red cloche, a waist-length string of pearls draped around her neck.   
  
“Good morning,” she said. “Nice place you’ve got here.”   
  
“Um, thanks.”   
  
“Give me the grand tour.”   
  
He looked around. His bed and dresser were in one corner, behind a freestanding Japanese-style screen; in the area that served as a kitchen, there was a fresh pot of coffee on the stove and a small paper box of éclairs he’d picked up from the patisserie earlier on his well-scrubbed wooden table. His workspace was his workspace. Piled against the back wall were stacks and stacks of completed paintings, in various sizes, that he knew to be technically proficient but lacking in whatever it was that made paintings great. These concealed only the lower half of his enormous, unfinished, terrible non-masterpiece.   
  
“It’s one room,” he said.   
  
Leslie had already started moving the smaller paintings away from  _The Ice Town_ , and he moved to help her, the inevitable sense of dread building in the pit of his stomach.   
  
Once the painting was clear, Leslie stepped back, standing next to him, so that she could take the whole thing in. Unusually for her, she said nothing. She said nothing for so long that Ben began to feel hot under the collar.   
  
“So, what do you think?” he said, when he couldn’t take the silence any longer. “I mean, you see why I never finished it.”   
  
Leslie shook her head. “I don’t, actually.” She turned to him. “Ben, I like it a lot. This is really good.”   
  
He blinked. “No one says that.” Chris, master of meaningless praise and positive thinking, had never even said that.  
  
“Who cares what other people say? You know it’s good. You do, right?”   
  
“I…”   
  
“Or else you wouldn’t have done this much work on it.”   
  
She took his right hand with both of hers and squeezed it gently, and they stood there for a moment, looking at each other’s hands until Leslie stepped back a few paces, cleared her throat, and began fidgeting with the ends of her bob again. The absence of her touch burned.   
  
Ben was just about to say something when Leslie asked, “Could I use your powder room?”   
  
He nodded and pointed behind the screen that concealed his bed.   
  
While he waited for her to return, he fidgeted. He poured two cups of coffee and added milk and five sugars to one. He took the éclairs out of their box and arranged them on the best of his mismatched plates, putting them at right angles so they formed an “L.”  _Ridiculous_ , he thought, but maybe she wouldn’t notice. He wiped coffee drips from the stove with a paint-stained dishcloth.   
  
A scraping noise alerted him to the fact that Leslie had emerged from the powder room. The sound immediately registered as that of his chaise being dragged across the floor. He turned around and saw that it was. Leslie had dragged it into the center of the pool of sunlight in his workspace and draped herself across it.   
  
She had also removed her all of her clothing, save the long pearl necklace.  
  
He found her eyes, and she jerked her head towards his easel.   
  
“Get to work,” she said. Even though she smiled, he knew she was deadly serious.   
  
She was different, this Leslie, and it wasn’t just because she was nude. Something else had changed, something that was hard to put his finger on at first. Finally he understood.   
  
“It’s strange to see you…”   
  
She swallowed. “Nude?”   
  
He shook his head. “No. Sitting so still when you’re not doing anything.”   
  
Leslie looked stricken, as though there was one element of modeling she hadn’t considered, and that element was how long it generally took. She sat up, swinging her legs over the side of the chaise so that her back was partially turned to him.   
  
“Wait,” he called--quickly, before she could stand up. “That’s it.”   
  
“Hmm?”   
  
The left side of her face was turned toward him; she looked down, past her shoulder, at the pearls puddled near her hip on the chaise’s seat. Her weight was shifted slightly towards the right, giving a soft, delicate curve to her spine. He could see her thighs, the right mostly hidden behind the left, both of them perfectly rounded. Sunlight flooded the room, backlighting her perfectly; just enough spilled over the top of her shoulder, its skin smooth and pale.   
  
“Hold your pose,” he breathed. “Just like that. Please.”   
  
Leslie nodded.   
  
He’d sketched her so many times without her knowing; it was easier, somehow, when she knew. Ben meant to remain conscious of the time, of how long she’d been holding her pose; he meant to continue some sort of conversation. But when he started drawing her this time, everything else receded, faded into the background; after two minutes, or maybe ten, he was aware of everything but fully conscious of nothing but Leslie, Leslie’s body, warm and breathing and still before him. His pencil became an extension of his hand, the paper an extension of his mind, and the room nowhere, a non-place in which he did not exist but merely drew. He saw her; he saw her on the chaise and he saw her on the paper, and for a time, neither seemed more nor less real than the other. His pencil, by now moving entirely of its own volition, shaded in the curve of her shoulder, the slight vee of her shoulder blade, a tiny mole on her back. His pencil traveled down her waist, moving it from three-dimensional space to two-dimensional and, seemingly, back again. His fingers smudged crisp lines into shadows: her calves, partially shaded; her feet, toes pointed gracefully to the floor.   
  
“Ben.”   
  
His name sounded rough, gravelly with disuse; this detail barely registered.   
  
“Hmm?”   
  
“Come to the other side.”  
  
“What?”   
  
“I want to watch you draw me.”   
  
Obligingly--that was all he wanted to do, oblige her--Ben moved to the other side of the chaise.   
  


* * *

  
  
She watched him draw her. She watched for what seemed like hours, although it couldn’t have been hours; the sun hadn’t moved. Sitting almost perfectly still wasn’t boring, as it turned out. No, this was maddeningly fascinating: his pencil flying across the paper, his eyes focused, his tongue poking at the corner of his mouth. When she’d come to the studio, Ben had been in shirtsleeves, but he’d looked put together. Now he was rumpled, nicely rumpled, with a tinge of sweat at his collar, his fingers tinged with charcoal.   
  
Soon enough, her right hand started yearning for a pencil of her own.   
  
“Ben,” she said again. He looked up. “I want to see. Can I see?”   
  
He contemplated his work for a moment. Then, wordlessly, he crossed the few steps between them and handed her the sketchpad.   
  
Leslie had almost forgotten she was nude, but there she was on the paper, nude in charcoal as she was in body. He’d switched drawing perspectives when she’d asked him to move, so that both her front and back sides were rendered; they were of the same image, but he’d done it in a naturalistic way. She was relieved to find her drawn self whole, and not Cubist. Seen this way, as Ben saw her--was this as Ben saw her?--she was beautiful. More than that. Exquisite.   
  
She looked up, from the art to the artist. Ben was watching her. He said nothing.   
  
She pulled him down to the chaise and kissed him. She heard the sketchpad fall to the floor. They both ignored it. She made sure he wasn’t just kissing her, but touching her; she wanted those hands on her breasts, wanted those charcoal smears on her ribcage and her collarbones.   
  
Before she could tell him to take his own clothes off (she couldn’t say anything with him kissing her like that), he’d smeared charcoal down her hip and across to her abdomen.   
  
“Do it,” she whispered, when he paused for breath. His finger touched her, made her shiver, and then slid inside. She shifted against the chaise, pulling Ben closer, more on top of her. Even under her touch, sunlight warmed his back. His mouth left hers, went lower, found her nipple and stopped there for a while, and she wasn’t sure what to do, didn’t know what she wanted, whether she wanted all of him now or only part, whether she wanted to take control or lie back and let whatever was happening continue to happen.   
  
In the end, she made herself a compromise. She let Ben continue to play her body, confirming by touch what he’d already confirmed by pencil, until she twisted against him and came crashing back down to earth. He sat up then, sweaty and apparently quite pleased with himself.   
  
“My turn now,” Leslie said, though she continued to luxuriate on the chaise. Just for a moment, she’d let herself luxuriate.   
  
“Your turn? I thought that was your turn.”   
  
“Wait here,” Leslie ordered. Finally, she stood up. She slipped behind Ben’s Japanese-style screen and grabbed a familiar shirt, one she’d seen on a few of their jaunts about Paris. She slipped it on. The sleeves were already rolled up. It smelled familiar.   
  
Ben stood up when she approached the chaise, slid a hand behind her head, and kissed her thoroughly, so thoroughly she could feel it right down to her toes, bare against the rough hardwood floor.   
  
“Leslie,” he breathed. It was a complete sentence.   
  
“My turn,” she said. She gave Ben a gentle shove, so that he sat on the chaise. “Clothes off.”   
  
“You just put my shirt  _on_ ,” he said.   
  
Leslie picked up a pencil and turned the sketchpad to a clean sheet.   
  
“I know,” she said. “What I meant was, it’s my turn to draw you.” She would start, she had decided, with his butt.   
  
Ben smiled and unbuttoned his shirt.  
  
 ** _fin_**


End file.
